Last week, a UK court granted full parental rights to a couple in their seventies over a child born via surrogacy. Let that sink in – a newborn baby placed into the care of people who are statistically likely to pass away before that child finishes school. This isn’t compassionate. It isn’t progressive. And it certainly isn’t child-centred. It’s reckless – and emblematic of how far we’ve drifted from safeguarding the most vulnerable.
In this particular case, a British couple – both aged 72 – applied to the courts for a parental order in July, after the baby was born six months earlier to a surrogate in California. The child was conceived using the husband’s sperm and a donor egg, making him the biological father, but leaving the child with no genetic link to the mother now raising him. The judge granted the parental order to give what he described as “permanence and security” to the child’s care arrangements, “in circumstances where no one else other than Mr and Mrs K seek to provide lifelong care for him”.
But let’s be honest — we’re not talking about a queue of other would-be carers being turned away here. We’re talking about a vulnerable child who has been commissioned into existence, separated from his birth mother at delivery, denied his maternal genetic heritage, and handed into the arms of two elderly strangers who paid £151,000 to the surrogate mother and agency to facilitate the arrangement. (The Times)
This is not the first time the courts have endorsed this kind of scenario. In fact, it’s the third such case in the last year alone, when British intended parents in their sixties and seventies have been granted legal parenthood for babies born to surrogate mothers abroad. The exception is becoming the new normal.
A global trade in women’s wombs and children’s lives
The international surrogacy market was valued at over $14 billion in 2022, and it’s projected to surge to $129 billion by 2032, according to a report by Precedence Research. This is not just about families – it’s about profit.
Every year, it is estimated that at least 20,000 babies are born globally through surrogacy arrangements. (International Social Service Global Surrogacy Study) While exact numbers are difficult to pin down due to poor regulation and reporting, the trend is unmistakable: demand is booming, and vulnerable women – often in lower-income countries – are being recruited to meet it.
In Ukraine, for instance, surrogates are typically paid around £10,000 – a fraction of the £100,000–£150,000 that commissioning couples may spend when using surrogacy services in the US. (CNN) Meanwhile, countries like India have already moved to ban commercial surrogacy for foreigners, citing widespread exploitation and abuse of women. (BBC News)
In the UK, although commercial surrogacy is technically illegal, so-called “altruistic” surrogacy remains legal and increasingly common. According to the Law Commission, the number of parental orders (which legally transfer parenthood from surrogate to commissioning parents) has tripled in a decade – from 117 in 2011 to over 400 by 2020.
Who gets forgotten? The child
The child is the silent party in all this, yet the one with the most at stake.
What will this baby, given to parents in their seventies, experience when they must grieve and bury them in their teenage years? How will they make sense of being conceived through a financial arrangement, carried by one woman, and handed to another set of adults, with their birth mother legally erased from view?
This is not simply a legal transaction. It’s a profound rupture of the natural order of parenthood, and it leaves a mark.
Children separated from their biological parents – even at birth – face elevated risks of:
- Attachment disorders, where a child struggles to form secure emotional bonds
- Identity confusion, especially in adolescence, around their origins and sense of belonging
- Anxiety, depression, and behavioural issues, more common in adoptees and children raised outside their biological families
- Loss of access to family medical history, creating difficulties in managing inherited health conditions
As adoption studies have consistently shown, the loss of biological connection – even in loving adoptive homes – carries psychological weight. A 2013 study in Adoption Quarterly found that adoptees, on average, experience higher levels of internalising problems such as depression and anxiety compared to non-adoptees. Surrogacy carries many of the same psychological risks – but with an added layer of commodification.
The surrogate – the woman who carried the child for nine months – is contractually and legally cut out. There is no assumed need for the child to know her, let alone bond with her. In no other area of child welfare would we celebrate this kind of pre-planned maternal separation.
The Lie of “Love”: What Surrogacy really is
We’re told surrogacy is “love in action”. But real love doesn’t turn people into products. Real love doesn’t turn reproduction into a service industry.
Surrogacy, even in its most well-meaning forms, commodifies human life. It reduces conception and birth to logistics. It presents children as entitlements, and women’s wombs as rentable resources. The veneer of altruism conceals a deeply transactional reality.
What’s more, surrogacy disproportionately affects the poor. Wealthy individuals and couples can shop for surrogates across borders, often targeting women in financial distress. This is not empowerment – it’s economic coercion.
The UK must ban Surrogacy, not regulate It
This latest court ruling should be a red flag. We are normalising an industry that severs mothers from babies, and babies from their biological identity – all to satisfy adult longing.
The only moral response is not to regulate surrogacy more efficiently – it is to abolish it completely.
- Ban it for the sake of children, who deserve the right to be born into stable, natural families
- Ban it for the sake of women, who deserve better than to be treated as service providers in a reproductive marketplace
- Ban it for the sake of society, which must not enshrine in law the idea that human life can be commissioned and delivered on demand
The courage to tell the truth
Let’s be blunt:
Children are not products.
Women are not vessels.
And love is not for sale.
If we continue down this road, we are entrenching a system where the poor are farmed for their fertility, and children are assigned the role of accessories to adult lifestyles. That is not compassionate. That is dystopian.
We must reject the lie that surrogacy is a harmless act of generosity. It is a profound injustice to women, to children, and to the dignity of human life itself.
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